The Wolverine.

This is my take on Polar Lights 1/8 scale Wolverine. As you know from previous posts, I love Marvel characters and Wolverine is my favourite. When this kit of my favourite Adamantium clad mutant became available to me I just had to get it!

This Polar Lights kit has been re-issued with two alternate heads of our favourite X-Man, one masked and one unmasked. The figure is moulded in an impressive fighting pose and sits on top of a display base in the form of a freshly sliced and diced sentinel mutant killer robot. Just like a scene straight out of one of Marvel’s X-Men comics!

Here is how the kit looks built out of the box with the original masked head:

I modified my kit to look more like a scene from one of the comic books, especially the art style of Jim Lee. So I added detail to Wolverines shoulder armour, made a new belt buckle, added detail to his gauntlets and I also added details to the sentinels head.

As I continued the build I wanted to evoke a sense of dynamic action from the pose so I went a little further, scoring out claw marks on the sentinel and then tearing a hole out of its head! This led to me scratch building a brain for our sentinel from bits found in the box and adding more wiring. I finished off by adding some more parts for our hero to slice and dice and by adding some tears to his uniform by moulding torn material from plastic putty. The entire model was painted in acrylics and lightly weathered with oils and enamel washes. I really enjoyed this as it was a departure from my usual “Must get it right!” accuracy quest. With this one it was like being a kid a again playing with action figures……it was fun!

I was trying to get that comic book look and I think this build has achieved that. When you consider a 1/8 sculpt of Wolverine can cost hundreds of dollars, building this kit and adding a few simple mods is a great way to have a hero figure on the display shelf for a fraction of the cost of the vinyl statue.

I hope you enjoy this model as much as I have! Here is how the finished build ended up!